The Ultimate Why Question

why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

John F. Wippel

Publication Year: 2012

This volume gathers studies by prominent scholars and philosophers about the question how have major figures from the history of philosophy, and some contemporary philosophers, addressed "the ultimate why question": why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Permission from the respective copyright holders to reprint here the following
previously published material is gratefully acknowledged: Nicholas
Rescher, “Optimalism and the Rationality of the Real: On the Prospects
of Axiological Explanation,” Review of Metaphysics 59 (2006):
503–16, ...

Introduction

The title of this book is in itself controversial and so, too, is the book’s
theme: “The ultimate why question: why is there anything at all rather
than nothing whatsoever?”1 For some philosophers, that something now
exists and therefore that something has always existed is simply a brute
fact and needs no explanation. ...

Part One. Contributions in Ancient Philosophy

1. Goodness, Unity, and Creation in the Platonic Tradition

By “the Platonic tradition” I mean to indicate certain fundamental principles
shared by Plato and by all those who identified themselves as his
disciples. From the perspective of the soi-disants followers of Plato, he
was not the first or the only revealer of the truth; he was, though, the
most sublime. ...

2. The Question of Being, Non-Being, and “Creation ex Nihilo” in Chinese Philosophy

Some commentators on Chinese philosophy maintain the position that
in classical Chinese philosophy there is no question about being. Yu Jiyuan
asserts that Aristotle’s examination of the question of being is linked
to predication.1 That the Chinese language lacks the pertinent subjectpredicate
grammar of Greek leads Yu to deny that the question ...

Part Two. Contributions in Medieval Philosophy

The question “Why is there anything at all rather than absolutely nothing?”
was not a question medieval Arabic-speaking philosophers were
prone to raise, at least not in this exact wording. Instead, they were more
concerned with the related question, “Why is there a world rather than
no world at all?” or more exactly, “Why does the world have the particular
features that it has?” ...

4. Thomas Aquinas on the Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Anything at All Rather than Nothing Whatsoever?

Let me begin by acknowledging that I have not found Aquinas raising
this question in these exact words. But it is interesting to note that a contemporary
of his who was teaching in the Faculty of Arts at the University
of Paris, the so-called Latin Averroist, Siger of Brabant, did address
the question in these terms. ...

Part Three. Contributions in Modern Philosophy

5. Causa sui and Created Truth in Descartes

Why is there anything at all rather than absolutely nothing? This paradigmatically
philosophical question is a request for an ultimate reason
that renders existence fully intelligible. Some have insisted that this request
is reasonable—indeed, the very foundation of rationality—and
have urged that, when pressed, ...

6. Being and Being Grounded

The world today stands under the spell of Leibniz’s thought. Or, perhaps
more carefully, we might say that the world today stands under the spell
of what Leibniz thought only too well. With uncanny perceptiveness, he
managed to articulate a basic principle of thinking and being in the early
modern world that is arguably as vital today ...

7. Why Is There Anything at All Rather than Absolutely Nothing?: F. W. J. Schelling’s Answer to the Ultimate Why Question

The last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the
nineteenth belong to the most interesting and important periods of German
philosophy, if not even of modern Western philosophy tout court.
Frederick C. Beiser rightly calls this time of Kant’s critical philosophy and
of German Idealism “one of the most revolutionary and fertile” ...

8. The Ultimate Why Question: The Hegelian Option

The question posed in the title of this volume, “The Ultimate Why Question,”
is a venerable one that is usually understood to ask why there is
something rather than nothing and answered by positing a highest
cause, a transcendent God. The aim of this chapter is to introduce and
explore an alternative interpretation of the question ...

Part Four. Contemporary Contributions

9. Some Contemporary Theories of Divine Creation

Conceptions of God can be classified conveniently into two rough sorts,
those that conceive God as a determinate entity, and those that conceive
God as the ground of being, not a determinate entity within or alongside
the world.1 The intellectual strategy of classifying conceptions is by
no means innocent. ...

10. Pragmatic Reflections on Final Causality

Setting out to write a little paper on “the ultimate why question” is the
sort of thing that only philosophers would do—at least as anything more
than a joke. In fact, one fears that it is just the kind of thing that has
made people in our very practical age turn away altogether from philosophy
as what seems to many if not most of them a perfectly useless
pursuit. ...

11. Optimalism and the Rationality of the Real: On the Prospects of Axiological Explanation

Is the real ultimately rational? Can we ever manage to explain the nature
of reality—the make-up of the universe as a whole? Is there not an insuperable
obstacle here—an infeasibility that was discerned already by Immanuel
Kant, who argued roughly as follows: The demand for a rationale
that accounts for reality-as-a-whole is a totalitarian demand. ...

Bibliography

Contributors

Daniel O. Dahlstrom, chair of the Department of Philosophy at Boston
University, is the author of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (2001) and
Philosophical Legacies (2008). A former president of the Metaphysical Society
of America and currently presiding officer of the Heidegger Circle, ...

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